Understanding and managing notifications

摘要

In today's always-connected world, we receive a large number of notifications on our mobile devices. These notifications cause interruptions, stress, and even impact users' lifestyle. To understand how users respond to notifications, we develop an application that monitors various features (e.g., importance) of the notifications, users' actions, and the level of users' engagement with the notifications. We recruit 30 users to use the application and monitor over 30 days, and subsequently find that 20% to 50% of the notifications generally get ignored by the users. In addition, we also solicit explicit feedback about the importance of notifications from 12 users over 14 days and identify the relation between perceived importance and users' engagement level. Based on this study, we identify the key characteristics of notifications and users' engagement, which is further substantiated by an onfine survey of 400+ users. In addition, we develop a notification manager that includes a machine learning based prediction model and that shows only the important notifications and delays the unimportant notifications. Our experimental results show that our notification manager automatically assesses the importance of notifications with more than 87% accuracy. We believe this work is a promising step toward intelligent personal assistant that manages notifications.